Most healthcare practices rely on scheduled appointments to provide an agreed time and place to serve patients. In many cases, after serving a patient, a return appointment will be recommended for some time in the future. Often, an appointment is made for a return visit before the patient leaves the office. However, if the needed appointment is too far out, if staff schedules are unreliable, or if a suitable appointment cannot be found quickly, then the office may instead choose to use a recall. A recall is a notice, sent to the patient prior to the desired appointment date, reminding the patient to call to schedule an appointment.
Contacting patients who are overdue for health care services is a cost-effective way of both improving care and increasing revenue by filling available appointments. However, existing methods of identifying overdue patients use unreliable means of identifying patients who are overdue for care. Consequently, the call list is often both incomplete and inaccurate.
Many management systems that schedule patient appointments provide support for recall notices. Typically, these systems allow entry of a target date for the unscheduled appointment, which is associated with the patient, and some notes about the reason for the recall. On a regular basis, the management system is used to generate printed cards, letters or address labels, so that reminders to call for an appointment can be sent to the appropriate patients. Instead of printed reminders, automated calling systems are sometimes used to leave a recorded message requesting a return call to schedule an appointment.
These systems often provide a list of patients who have not responded to recall notices, so that these patients can be contacted or reminded again. Unfortunately, a simple list of unresponsive patients is inadequate for multiple schedulers involved in a shared, sustained effort to contact patients and schedule these appointments. Schedulers require a record of the times and dates of messages left so that additional messages are not left with the same patients until a sufficient time has elapsed as to warrant another contact. Further, schedulers require that as patients are contacted successfully and appointments are scheduled, that these patients are deleted from the list so that these are not contacted again after an appointment is made.
Thus, the health care industry needs a system for generating complete and reliable call lists using only data that is readily available in most offices.